“Thank you for taking the time to write to me about the recent ‘news’ story that is a mixture of truth and falsehood, ” Dr Rekers began in what sounds like a standard boilerplate reply. “Jesus is my hero,” he announced, “who loves even the culturally despised people, including sexual sinners and prostitutes. Like Jesus Christ, I deliberately spend time with sinners with the loving goal to try to help them. Mark 2:16-17 reads, ‘When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” On hearing this, Jesus said to them…”

And it goes on like that for awhile.

Finally Dr. Rekers brings his hop, skip and jump through the Gospels to a close with a long-winded encomium to himself that starts off with the ringing line: “Like John the Baptist and Jesus, I…”

As the L. A. coroner in the OJ Simpson case famously remarked, this doesn’t pass the smell test.

Will the good doctor climb up on a cross like his hero and ascend into heaven too? And how exactly did he “reveal” to use his words, the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the fallen ‘Lucien”? Did the revelation include bathrobes suddenly parting in hotel rooms?

Odd in the face of all this selfless ministry that at first the good doctor said he had no idea that the boy he hired through the innocently titled Rentboy.com was a prostitute. No mention of teaching the Sermon on the Mount then.

In fact, the doctor was shocked and saddened to learn the harsh truth about the gentle man-child who carried his bags for 10 days through Europe and who, in the first lines of his profile on Rentboy.com was offering not only blandishments for the sweetness of his hairless rear and the prodigious length of his robust front, but a handy summation for his entire package in a phrase as classic as boyhood: “Up for Anything.”

Nothing, oddly, about muscle strength for lifting suitcases.

Shocked and saddened, we remind our readers, was Dr. Rekers in his first draft of the tale. But now the record has been set very much straight. In their single hotel room, Dr. Rekers proclaims, they passed the long Roman nights “sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse.”

Oh the prayers that were pitched to heaven with each shooting starburst.

An explanation of such fantastic proportion that it must finally dethrone the once royally unassailable: “I have a wide stance.”

Let us then imagine the sort of science that was shared on that far-away night, overlooking we would like to think a palazzo in the glow of bursting fireworks. The desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse. Oh, how they desired it. Oh, the prayers that were pitched to heaven, with each shooting starburst.